There are few people in the computer industry that have shaped the evolution of the microprocessor (and related technologies) as much as Pat Gelsinger. More than 25 years ago, he began his career “one step above janitor” as a Technician 2 at Intel, stuffing boards. He eventually rose to the position of the company’s first chief technology officer (CTO), before taking his current posting as executive vice president of the Digital Enterprise Group.

Read the full interview that Wolfgang Gruener and I conducted here.

I had a chance to catch up with Mitch Kapor over the past week. Kapor is one of the founding lights of the modern PC software industry. He was at the helm at the beginning of the Lotus Development Corporation in the early 1980s and saw his applications run on the earliest business PCs. He was responsible for many seminal software projects, including 1-2-3, Agenda, and Notes. I can remember using the first version of 1-2-3 to build various mathematical models for the companies that I worked for back then, and still have my slipcase of the software and original 5.25 inch floppies (not that I have a PC that has any floppy drives on it anymore, but it is nice to have these early touchstones of technology).

Kapor had a broad vision of where he wanted our industry to go, and wasn’t afraid to use his influence and wealth to push us along. He was one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation back in the early 1990s when legal issues in cyberspace such as privacy and access to online information were largely uncharted territory. Before becoming the chair of the board of the Mozilla Foundation, he was a venture capitalist and had numerous other charitable efforts.

Today, Kapor is running the Open Software Applications foundation, building a new product called Chandler that will focus on using open source methods for personal information management.  He took time out from his schedule to exchange some rather pointed emails with us about where he has been, what it has been like competing with Microsoft, and where open source software is going.

Q: I think our audience would love to hear what your views on when you use open source versus when you develop with commercial software.

A: Let’s distinguish between products you use and projects you undertake.  For the former, it feels too purist to say “I will only use open source.” Sometimes the best tool for the job happens to be proprietary. At the same time, being thoughtful about trying to assemble a working set of open source tools seems totally reasonable. Linux-based desktops, for instance, require a fair amount of upkeep. Is it worth it? And compared to what? These days, so does a Windows desktop, with all of the virus and spyware problems. Personally, I use a Mac as I don’t want to be my own system administrator.  On the other hand, if you are already a sysadmin, the incremental effort to do it for yourself is a lot less.

In creating a new project, I think you have to look at your goals. If it is possible to create an open source solution, then good, but I don’t think you can assume that it’s always going to be possible. If you’re trying to build a business around the project, then you have think through how you expect to get revenue. Sometimes a consulting and service model will work on top of an open source code base, but not always.

Q: Firefox has become its own operating system, and dare I say, way of life. Have we reached the end of the line where reasonably technical people can admin their own desktop browsers?

A: My experience of setting up Firefox has been different and better. It has been straight-forward, a matter of a few clicks at most to get Flash, Real Player, and perhaps a handful of other extensions installed and working.  his is an enormous improvement from earlier on in which I was just unable to get all the pieces I needed installed and working to support pain-free viewing of the web sites I visited. As they say, YMMV (your mileage may vary).

That said, wouldn’t it be better if Firefox came bundled with a Flash player, etc., or its installer detected a need for customary extensions and could install at the same time? There’s no technical reason why it couldn’t happen.

Pragmatically, I think we have to distinguish between a base set of extensions and everything else. It gets progressively more difficult to create seamless solution when there are nearly infinite possibilities for customization and tweaking of settings. There’s a basic tension in principle which can never be completely resolved. Even so, there is still considerable room for improvement, but it will take a increased emphasis on usability as integrated into the development process for maximum progress to occur. There are a host of techniques and practices for working on usability, but the skill set to do so is a specific one, and usability specialists have to become an integral part of the open source development process. See http://www.flossusability.org/ for details on a Free/Libre/Open Source Usability Sprint.

Eventually, the uses of metadata (emerging from today’s rapidly evolving baby steps of XML, RDF, tags, microformats and the like) will become sufficiently sophisticated that programs will be constructed express what they need to work successfully in a way there can be automated dialogs, (largely) self-configuring software, and automatically high-level constructed high-level configuration wizards for advanced users which will tame the beast. This is a vision and dream, not imminent reality, but I am impressed with recent developments. The year 2005 might be the year of metadata.

Q: You have been a competitor of Microsoft’s for more than 20 years. What is Microsoft doing right with respect to the Internet and what is their major weakness?

A: The biggest weakness is that they do not have a business model which is well-suited for the coming era. Will Microsoft try to force users to adopt new proprietary standards and  in Longhorn? It will be tempting for them to try to do as as a way to preserve their hold and they may have some considerable success. I think ultimately such moves will fail, as the collective power of openness and the superiority of open source economics is too great. See the paper “Coase’s Penguin” by Yochai Benkler. (http://www.benkler.org/CoasesPenguin.html)

Microsoft has never intended to compete on a level playing field. Instead they have tipped the field to favor themselves, sacrificing product quality and user benefit over and over again. This strategy is coming to the end of its useful life.

When motivated, however, Microsoft can develop powerful technology, especially if it sees itself as playing catch-up in responding to competitive threats, as they did in bringing Internet Explorer to parity with, and then beyond, the Netscape browser in the 1990’s.

Q: As we go beyond 3 GHz CPUs, doesn’t writing better code make a more compelling case? And not just for gamers and video editing, but for general office applications?

A: I think there are advantages to writing better code beyond speed of execution, e.g., maintainability. Far more time is spent dealing with poorly structured code than is justified by taking the quick and dirty approach.

Q: The browser has become the defacto user interface for many applications, both professional and consumer. Does this mean that software developers who write interface modules are getting lazy or getting better at providing more usable code?

A: The rise of the browser as an application interface is generally a good thing. Services like Google’s Gmail and others show how it is possible to improve usability to the point where running an application in a browser is no longer like writing with the brick tied to a pencil. I expect that the trend of UI improvements for the browser is going to continue to accelerate to the point of parity with desktop UI for many classes of application. It will simplify application development a lot, and this is a good thing.

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Michael Robertson, music’s bad boy CEO, is at it again, causing trouble for music publishers, Microsoft, and just the overall Computing Establishment. The CEO of Linspire (formerly known as Lindows until Microsoft’s legal team had their way with him) has come out swinging with new enhancements to the company’s operating system, adopting a pay-as-you model to download Linux applications. The fervent hope: to make Linux into a desktop operating environment that anyone, including your mother, could use. And to use Linux as a wedge to get back into making a better digital music experience.

We spoke to Robertson at his annual Destkop Linux Summit show in Del Mar, California last week. “My original vision for Lindows was not to create an operating system but to create the CNR warehouse. So we adopted the CNR model and said we will do for Linux apps what we did for music.” CNR stands for Click-and-buy: it is a catalog of various Linspire-ready applications that are available, some for free and others for a small fee. You merely bring up a Web browser, click on the application that you want, and once you register and provide your payment details, you can download at will. Think of iTunes for software, and you aren’t far off.

“We quickly discovered [several years ago] that all of the Linux versions at the time were awful for consumers and in such a sorry state. It was a mess, a disaster. And we realized that you pretty much have to control the OS to make CNR work with any kind of reliability. So we were forced into the OS business.”

Over the course of the 20-minute interview, which you can download the audio recording <here>, Robertson was at times jocular and caustic. Linspire ships with a built-in suite of Office-like applications that can read and write Microsoft file formats, along with their own Web browser based on the Mozilla code base. “I love that people are just wetting themselves over Firefox, that is just great. We have been saying that Mozilla is better for two years, and finally the world has woke up to Firefox.”

Earlier in the day, Robertson was the featured keynote at the conference. While he began his keynote 30 minutes late, he immediately moved into a high-energy pitch: “People won’t say I am crazy anymore. We will show you the enormous distance that we have come.” He made fun of Linux’s shortcomings by showing pictures of early software screens and saying “back in the day, we didn’t have a screen capture program. We had to take pictures of the screen with an actual camera.”

Robertson introduced a beta version 5.0 of Linspire to the theme of the Hawaii 5-0 TV show. Clearly, this riff went over most of the audience’s heads, but the bouncing jingle still caught hold and was received warmly by the crowd of about 500 people attending the three-day conference.

“This is the product that Linux needs to go mainstream,” said Robertson. He promised that it will be shipping within the next month. He claimed that Linspire 5.0 was “at feature parity with XP,” and crowed, “Microsoft hasn’t put out a new version in three years and probably won’t for another three.”

The new version sports significant enhancements, including better wireless and Windows networking support. We were able to boot the beta on one of our Gigabyte laptops and be up and running within 15 minutes, with just a few mouse clicks and without having to resort to the Linux command line to make any real adjustments. On another white box it also recognized the hardware and ran effortlessly. The biggest drawback was a lack of printer support, but it does come with numerous printer drivers

The companion announcement to the new Linspire version is a new set of tools to download and organize digital music. These included a new Web-based music store, a new music appliance, and synchronization software to transport your songs between various music players, PC music applications, and new audio gear that run over wired and wireless networks in your home. Clearly, this is Robertson’s focus.

During the keynote, Robertson demonstrated a new site called Mp3Tunes.com that charges 88 cents per song. The site is operated by a separate company and he is also the CEO. The biggest difference between this site and numerous other music sites is that there are no restrictions on how many times you use the mp3 downloaded file. Robertson called it buying, rather than renting, your music.

“I didn’t like the direction that the music world was going,” he said during his keynote. “We decided for no DRM [digital rights management]. I wanted something so that my sons would find it easy to get music and listen to it anywhere. We need to push the world to an open standard, and that is MP3.” In our interview, he elaborated: “The only way you can get consumers to accept DRM is if you force it on them. And if you get your music via file sharing or by buying a CD, you don’t have any [usage] restrictions. And these options aren’t going away. We aren’t going to stop selling CDs for a few decades, and file sharing is going to be with us for a very long time.”

Interestingly, the startup of Mp3Tunes.com is déjà vu all over again for Robertson, who started the first mp3.com download site in the mid 1990s before selling the operation to a music publisher, after “building it into the largest mp3 music site in the world.” The site currently offers over 300,000 song titles “probably from no big name artists” said Robertson. “But that is okay, because people have plenty of CDs.” Clearly, what Robertson is banking on is to make the easiest system for consumers to manage their music libraries, and by removing any DRM restrictions (iTunes, for example, limits how many times a consumer can download a particular song after paying for it by requiring each computer to be registered to a particular user) and supporting a range of music devices and software programs.

At the center of this music ecosystem is a low-cost application called Mp3Beamer. This is another application that runs on top of Linspire and can turn any PC into a media ripping and storage unit. At the show, reseller sub300.com was demonstrating SFF white boxes that they built with the Linspire software. They could quickly rip and catalog music CDs with no operator intervention.

As part of this effort, Robertson’s crew has also written some code that works on both Windows and Mac versions of iTunes, allowing you to synchronize your songs that you download with the  Mp3Beamer. During the keynote, Robertson demonstrated songs that were ripped from a CD to the Beamer box, and then transferred to Windows and Linspire PCs as well as an iPod and a cell phone.

The Beamer box represents to Robertson the beginning of a new direction for consumers to “have lots of dedicated computers around you servicing your needs. Where we differ from Microsoft’s vision is on two fronts.  First, I don’t think you have one machine that does everything in the world. I think it is the opposite, with lots of machines that are dedicated to specific tasks and do them well. The future holds lots of appliance devices. Second, it is all about – for us – open standards and open formats. “Whatever device you use, we gotta give you an interface to your music,” he said during our interview.

Ironically, one of the open formats that he has embraced is Universal Plug and Play, enabling various media devices to work with the Beamer and his system. “Microsoft still doesn’t support UPnP in their media center edition, but we support it in our beamer.”

Robertson has gotten older and wiser in the intervening years since he first launched mp3.com. “I think the record industry has had a real changing of the guard. With almost every record label, old management is out and new management is in. It isn’t a coincidence that suddenly Apple could get a license to sell every song for a dollar. The record labels have come a long way.”

Will Linux become the desktop for the masses? We’ll see how stable and capable Linspire 5.0 is. But in the meantime, Robertson is once again challenging some established notions and striking out in some promising directions.

Most network administrators will do just about anything to keep streaming audio from clogging their enterprise Ethernet networks. But Tokyo DisneySea is a different kettle of fish. There, Disney’s network architects designed the new theme park’s network to mix audio and data packets over standard Fast Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet connections.

Here is a story from 2001 about the installation of the networks behind Disney’s Tokyo theme park.